


Humanity

by fraternite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, the other amis will come in soon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-03
Updated: 2014-04-03
Packaged: 2018-01-18 00:09:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1407709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a sense, he's won: The big oppressive governments of the world went down when the dead rose, the corporations and the political parties and the regimes forever overthrown by a force even stronger than themselves.  But the ideals Enjolras hoped to replace them with--liberty, equality, fraternity--are also gone forever, ideas almost completely irrelevant in this new world; even "human" is a complicated concept now.  Where does that leave Enjolras?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Humanity

Enjolras loved--had always loved--that moment when the protest took on a life of its own. It started out with one person giving a speech, or maybe a dozen people chanting a slogan and waving signs, and at the beginning it was always a very lonely endeavor--even scary. You stood up there on your box or your table or whatever you had and you heard your voice carrying above the city noise, sounding so small in the cold fall air, and it was just you, just you standing there before all the world. And then one person listened. And another. And another, and it was still just your lonely voice shouting at the world, but you could feel the energy building as you spoke. A murmur rose from the crowd, and someone cheered at something you said, and an old man shouted “Preach it!” and then the tumblers fell into place and the crowd was with you, all of you shouting together and you had started something that would go on now, even without you (though Enjolras would never dream of leaving; it was at moments like this that he felt most alive, looking out over a crowd with a life of its own, that together was something more powerful than any of the individuals who made it up).

It was like that now, as he shouted out the lines of the speech. The notecards Combeferre had typed up for him were clutched in his gloved hands, but he hadn’t looked down at them since he’d started; why would he? He knew this speech backwards and forwards, because everything in it was something he believed with his whole heart. The words came together on his lips (and yes, there was a part of his brain that knew that it was due to those late nights spent bent over a screen together, disassembling and reassembling phrases for maximum effectiveness, but he wasn’t _consciously_ drawing on any of that, and in the moment it felt like the words were just appearing out of nowhere) and the listeners responded. Courfeyrac started a chant, holding up a sign he had painted the night before, and the crowd took it up. The wind was cold on Enjolras’s cheeks, and he felt so happy he could almost laugh out loud.

And yes, he had a ten-page paper due on Tuesday that he hadn’t started yet, and yes, he was going to get fired if he skipped another shift at the cafeteria--but none of that seemed to matter now. All those things would come rushing back over him after the protest, he knew, but for now they melted away, because the only thing that mattered _in this moment_ was the flow of humanity marching for the Captiol to plant themselves on the steps and follow Courfeyrac’s lead and scream their slogans until the career politicians in there couldn’t hear themselves think and would have to pay attention, if only to tell them to clear out--and even that would make a big splash in the news and even if he was pointed out as the leader and spent a few hours in jail for protesting without a permit it wouldn’t matter because the more people heard, the more they would care, and maybe _this_ would finally be the protest that made a difference and led to--

and led to--

to--

 

And the realization that he didn’t know what cause they were protesting for jolted him out of the dream.

There was no confused moment before everything flooded back (he wished there was, to have just one more second to believe that none of this had happened). He knew, the instant he was aware of his head resting on his balled-up jacket, where he was and why he was there. Even without opening his eyes, he could see the sleeping bags lined up around him, the photo frames on the suburban walls of whatever house they were sheltering in, the quiet form of whoever was standing on watch. And perhaps he’d even known the whole time he was dreaming--because why else would he not have been able to think of a reason for the protest? There were so many causes he had marched for, before the outbreak--healthcare reform, LGBT rights, redistricting, gun control, abortion rights, immigration policy . . . the list of possible causes for his subconscious to choose from was nearly endless. But none of them meant anything now, and, even asleep, he couldn’t forget it.

He took a deep breath to steel himself to face the world (In the past, people had done it with coffee. Now air was all they had left.) and opened his eyes. On the other side of Courfeyrac, Combeferre was just sitting up, grimacing at the stiffness of his muscles. He looked down at Enjolras, his face still pinched and gray even after the six hours that counted as a full night’s sleep these days.

“That dream again?”

Enjolras nodded, wondering how he could possibly wear it that blatantly on his face. He didn’t say anything--he didn’t feel like talking about the dream. He just wanted to forget it as soon as possible. To do that, he knew, he should get up and get busy with everything that had to be done that day, throw himself into action to distract himself from what was in his head. But he didn’t feel like moving either.

Just then, Courfeyrac woke up the way he always did, with a start, thrashing suddenly into life. Enjolras watched his face undergo the same transformation it did every morning, the automatic smile that he always woke with freezing and then fading away as Courfeyrac remembered everything that happened. It was like watching the outbreak happen again each morning, seeing his friend lose everything again.

Courfeyrac shut his eyes for a moment, gathering himself for the day, then rolled over onto his stomach, propping himself up on his elbows.

“Good morning,” he said quietly to the other two. “Sleep all right?”

Combeferre shrugged. “All right,” he said.

“Be honest,” Courfeyrac said. “Did you actually sleep?”

“Not really.”

Courfeyrac frowned. “Ferre, this is like two weeks now you haven’t really been sleeping. You should take something. I know, I know,” he spoke over Combeferre’s protests. “It’s not exactly safe. But sleep deprivation impairs your judgement and your reflexes just as much a being drugged up on Nyquil, and you’ve got all of us to look out for you at night. Nothing’s going to happen, and you’d feel so much better even just getting one decent night of sleep a week. Wouldn’t you?”

Combeferre glanced over at Enjolras, but Enjolras, opinionless, shrugged. “I suppose you have a point,” Combeferre conceded. “Drowsiness and sleep deprivation are both dangerous, so I should opt for the one that takes place when I’m around plenty of other people and usually not required to have good reflexes.” He yawned and worked the cricks out of his neck. “I may be putting my life on the line, but we are all the time anyway, so it hardly matters.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for cold meds,” Courfeyrac offered. “What’s planned for today? Any commercial areas?”

“It’s mostly suburbs today, if I remember right. We could check medicine cabinets, I suppose, but I think the idea is to keep moving quickly right now, so there may not be time. And I’m not going to ask the whole group to stop just for my sake. I don’t need it that badly.”

“Maybe there’ll be something wherever we stop for the night. I know there’s nothing here; Jackie and Sam went through all the cabinets last night and there wasn’t much; this one’s been picked over at least once or twice already.”

Hearing the two of them discussing the logistics of the coming day was suddenly too much for Enjolras--it was all so exhausting, and the odds of their surviving so low despite all the frantic planning and the running and the fighting. He shut his eyes and let the words blend into the background noise of the group getting up and checking in for the morning, and wished he could just go back to sleep--a dreamless sleep, this time.

Courfeyrac poked him in the arm. “Enjolras. Hey, Enjolras. Time to get up.” Enjolras kept his eyes closed, considering the possibility of just ignoring him. He felt like his limbs had been replaced with molten lead, heavy and sloppy and impossible to move. Courfeyrac’s poking intensified. “Come on, Enj, you have to get up.”

“Why?” He said it without thinking, because it was the only thing in his head in the face of all the desperate, hopeless struggling to survive.

“‘Cause we’re leaving in twenty minutes and you still haven’t eaten breakfast.”

It wasn’t what he meant. But he opened his eyes anyway and pushed himself up onto his knees. Courfeyrac’s poking changed to a quick squeeze of Enjolras’s shoulder; then he jumped up and, weaving between the other ragged refugees, moved in the direction of the food stores.

Combeferre was fiddling with his pack, as he did every morning, pulling out the supplies he’d been given to carry and repacking them, trying to find the ideal arrangement of the load. All around them, the other survivors were carrying out morning routines of their own--sharpening weapons, checking gear, washing up, snatching a few quiet minutes of prayer or meditation. Enjolras was the only one still in his sleeping bag, so he dragged himself dutifully out of it and set about rolling it up.

Courfeyrac returned with three bowls precariously balanced in two hands. Breakfast was--as it was every day--cereal in warmish, speckly milk-from-dry-powder; Enjolras shoveled it down as quickly as he could and tried not to notice the taste. It was how they did everything now, it seemed. Walk twenty miles and try to ignore the blisters, because there’s no waiting for people who fall behind in the apocalypse. Sleep in a stranger’s house and try not to look at the photos of dead people on the living room walls or wonder what happened to them. Bash in the head of something that used to be a human being and try not to hear the crunching of bone and the squish of brain tissue. Do it all over again the next day, day after day, and try not to be conscious of how it’s wearing you down to nothing. Of how futile it all is anyway.

“Five minutes,” Pamela called out quietly. She had a knack for making her voice carry, even when she spoke in the softest tones, and Courfeyrac had once joked that she’d been made leader solely because of it. Actually, it really was an important skill for a leader to have, now that your survival depended on not making too much noise and working together as a group. Oration was a thing of the past; now lives were won and lost on stage whispers.

 

They were moving west.  It wasn’t an official decision (not that they had any system of governance besides someone to say when to start and stop walking each day) so much as a universal understanding that west was the way every sane person wanted to go.  It was common knowledge among all the refugees--although nobody really know how anyone knew it--that a major wave of the undead was fanning out from the East Coast cities, each individual zombie moving aimlessly perhaps, like single molecules, but the horde as a whole slowly and steadily marching west after the survivors who had gotten out of the cities. No one knew if the rumored horde was real, or how large it really was. No one cared to stick around to find out.

And so the group Enjolras and his friends had found themselves with were moving as quickly as they could to the west, stopping now and then to scavenge in deserted houses for supplies. Walking, of course (except for the three bicycles they had for scouting and for pulling the trailer full of drinking water in gallon jugs); driving was louder, less reliable, and--in streets blocked by wrecked and abandoned vehicles--actually much slower than walking.  On foot, they were limited by the amount of food they could carry on their backs; as a result, they had to avoid striking out so far into the countryside that they couldn’t resupply frequently while at the same time not getting too close to the (formerly) densely populated areas. The fine line between starving and becoming food for someone else was a difficult one to walk.

It was only a matter of time before they slipped up.

They’d come close on a number of occasions. They erred mostly on the side of keeping too close to civilization, Enjolras thought, ending up fighting off more zombies than they could safely handle (although one time they’d found themselves in a stretch of wooded country so long that most of them were down to a can or two of food--and half-crazy after days without seeing a single shambler but imagining them everywhere). It was probably strange to think about “safe” zombie encounters, when a single drop of their saliva (although Combeferre was pretty sure it wasn’t actually saliva, but a different fluid) entering your bloodstream was a surer death sentence than the worst diseases in the pre-outbreak world. But with weeks of dealing with the shuffling corpses blunting the terror a bit, you could look at it logically and see that a single zombie, or even a group of five or six, was really not a threat to twenty or so survivors with some experience. It was when you started out evenly matched with the zombies that your chances of everyone making it out of the encounter alive started to go down.

They’d had one of those fights the previous week, after walking in on a group of former survivors whose hideout had turned into a death trap when one of them didn’t let on he or she had been bitten. Enjolras, backed into a corner by two half-decayed women, had thought for just a moment that this was it, this was the mistake that finally dropped him. It wasn’t until much later on, after Pamela had saved his life by burying her crowbar in one woman’s skull so that she collapsed, tripping up the other, and after they had gathered themselves and checked for accidental bites and washed off the blood, that he’d realized the thought hadn’t really scared him. It was strange; he used to be--secretly--so scared of dying, petrified at the thought of all he would leave undone, all the years he would lose. Now, the thought hardly seemed to affect him. Maybe he’d spent so much time being scared that he’d finally lost the ability.

A metalic rattle and a string of swearing dragged Enjolras out of his thoughts. Ahead of him, the bike pulling the water trailer had stopped and the man who’d been riding it was cursing at it under his breath.

“What’s wrong?” Courfeyrac asked him, coming up behind.

“Fucking chain,” the man muttered. He was a bigger fellow, padded arms quickly toughening to muscle under the layer of dirt that darkened everyone’s skin. Enjolras knew they’d introduced themselves before, but he couldn’t remember the man’s name. Bruce, maybe, or “It fell off and it’s stuck in the shifting gears. We need to keep an eye out for a new bike; this piece of shit isn’t going to last much longer.”

“The tires are basically gone anyway,” Courfeyrac agreed. “Here, let me get it.” He crouched down--after the quick 360 scan for threats that had become second nature to them all--and, after a bit of fiddling, slipped the chain back over the gear.

“That was fast,” Bruce said as he climbed back on the bike and gingerly started to pedal again. “You use to bike a lot, before all this?”

“I drove a bike-taxi, back . . . back before this all started.” Courfeyrac laughed quietly. “I always want to say ‘back home,’ you know? Like this is all some foreign country and there’s someplace else where everything is still normal?”

“I tend to think of it as a previous life,” Bruce said. “Like reincarnation or something.”

“I like that. So what were you, in your past life?”

“I was an insurance agent.” He grinned wryly. “Disaster insurance for homes, mostly; our company did a lot of different policies, but that was what people mostly went to us for. Which is funny, now. I mean, I didn’t think of myself as a scammer, but we took a lot of people’s money and then, when the ultimate disaster hit, they got nothing out of it.” He turned to Enjolras. “What about you, chief? What were you in your previous life?”

Enjolras thought for a minute, rolling the possible answers around in his head. He’d been employed at the cafeteria; on official forms he’d written “student” . . . but those were just things he did. Not what he was.

“I was an activist,” he said finally.

**Author's Note:**

> i forgot to say this before, but this was betaed by nicecourfeyrac who is an absolute dear and i am very grateful for her help and advice


End file.
